idkwhatimevendoin

1. Do you have anything connected to SATA 4/5 or SATA-Express? Only one can be used at a time.
2. What M.2 SSD are you using? Only M.2 PCIE drives are supported.
 
Be sure to update to the latest BIOS for your revision of board, as noted by others above

Update, decided to check the manual and the revision nr. can be found in the bottom left.

 
I looked at the manual a bit further and posted my findings in your other thread, to keep the discussion in one place:
 

Took 2 or 3 tries.  Then it showed up, dropped once and has been fine since.  Kinda weird.

The only time I suggest partitioning is to separate System files (OS and programs) from data files. This makes restoring either data or the System much easier. An example is the computer I'm using rght now. It has a System Reserved partition, a C:/ partition, a data partition, and a factory restore partition.
 
Using partitions to organize data is extremely in efficient. Using folders instead is much easier and far more flexible.

Thank you for this.

I'd second this.

One of the benefits of partitioning is that if you need to reinstall Windows or move to another OS, then you can just wipe the one partition and all of your data remains. (easier to reinstall an OS)
 
One of the disadvantages is that it is not easy to resize partitions in most cases and resizing can sometimes cause issues or not work correctly, so you are more or less stuck with that amount of space that you partitioned if you run into this issue.
 
It is easier and less problematic to just have one drive.
 
I would leave it unpartitioned but that's just me. If you weight up the Pros and Cons then you can decide which method is best for you.

i hear some people saying you should put windows seperate from other programs since it could cause it to slow down or something like that.
i've also heard many people say that's entirely bullcrap.
So if you want to organize then sure you can do that but i don't belive it will be nessecary

Yes, just create one big partition of the whole drive. Windows will make one or two really small partitions for itself, which is normal. You'll install Windows on the biggest one, and then you're off to the races.

No, you are just fine!

Yea pretty good pick for a high performance ssd. Id get it.

Thank you!

You won't overheat an M.2 playing games.
Moving 4K video files from drive to drive or benchmarking over and over will slow the drive due to heat, but gaming shouldn't be a concern.

Heh, yep exactly, it's my first build, so thanks!  ;D

oh ur m.2 slot is literally right behind the gpu, gotcha. epic cable mgmt btw my rig  looks like shit was yeeted in there lol
 

Thank you so much for this.

I wanna upgrade my current boot drive which is a 1TB (300 GB partition) hard drive to either a separate 250 gb 2.5" SATA ssd or m.2 nvme ssd. 
 
I mainly use my PC for gaming and school work (no intense software is used lol) 
 
is there gonna be a benefit of having a m.2 ssd as a boot drive down the line cuz im pretty sure M.2 nvme ssd's have the same boot time as normal sata ssds.

and if you need extra ports you can buy a cheap sata expansion card on amazon for under £25

SATA ports are generally numbered. Here they are saying that ports 4 and 5 (counting generally starts at 0) will be disabled when M.2 or SATA Express are used. Ports 0-3 (and 6-X) should not be affected by this.

To add to what Lady Luna said, it's only two ports that get disabled. So you can still use your HDD as mass storage. You will be able to use all other SATA ports for any other drive you want, minus #4 and #5. They should be labeled on the board itself, if not, the manual likely will have a diagram of the board and show which ones they are. This is all completely normal across most, if not all, motherboards with M.2 slots.

Hi everyone!
I'm gonna buy a 250GB M.2 SSD (Kingston KC2000) to use as my boot drive & store some apps/software on it.
In the description of the SSD it says Based on “out-of-box performance” using a PCIe 3.0 motherboard. Thing is I dont know if my M.2 compartment is PCIe x3 as it is not mentioned anywhere on the manual, only thing that is mentioned is the PCIe x16 running at x16 (GPU).
I'm afraid I wont get the maximum utility out of this SSD.
How do I figure it out?
 
motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z97-D3H

Each PCI-E 3.0 lane is theoretically 8Gb/s. You're board supports a maximum of 10Gb/s on the m.2 slot for whatever reason. Z97 is a little wonky as it was the first generation to support m.2. Probably bottlenecked by the chipset.

On the Gigabyte website it states.......
 
GIGABYTE 9 series motherboards come equipped with an onboard M.2 slot, providing users PCI-Express connectivity for SSD devices. Delivering up to 10 Gb/s data transfer speeds, M.2 offers users considerably faster storage performance than current mSATA and even SATA Revision 3 (6Gb/s) storage devices.